


Reciprocation

by jellyfishline



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Castiel POV, M/M, Unrequited Love, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-17
Updated: 2014-04-17
Packaged: 2018-01-19 16:40:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1476724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jellyfishline/pseuds/jellyfishline
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are not his lover, nor brother nor angel nor friend. You are an ally in a warzone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reciprocation

There are no spaces between the two of you. Even when you’re distant, there’s no escaping his presence. No empty movements, half-made gestures. Even the silences are packed with things. You do not ask him questions. He does not give you answers.

He does not tell you that he loves you. Does not hold you in his arms at night. Does not come to you and beg for your forgiveness. But when you look, the knees of his jeans are worn and dirty. He has been kneeling for you. His fingers are calloused where he prays.

There is a bottle of whiskey in his jacket. His fingers are sure where he grips the neck and twists, a clean, professional beheading. He drinks the fire down like he wants it to burn his bones. You want to put a hand to his shoulder. Tell him that you know for a fact that his heart is still beating itself against his padlocked ribcage. He is no ghost, no too-loyal long-shuffled coil. His mortal blood is pounding in his veins, and in silences you think you hear it, softly. You think it sounds like clockwork ticking down the hours till he gets the death he seeks.

But Death does not await Dean, nor you. You have made a life time out of cheating him. When Death comes for Dean, Dean will be an old, old man. You’ll make sure of that, with every ounce of strength and certainty in you.

You do not tell him that you keep him safe. That you watch him while he sleeps, observe the breath that exits his lungs in quiet, sealike rhythms. You do not press your ear to his chest to hear the roil and wave of it. The warmth of him might make your vessel melt and free you into vapor and gleam.

If you were a man, you could hold him. You could curl up into his space at night, free of deceit. Kiss the creases from his face, mark his jaw with lullabies of lips. You would wind yourself into the empty spaces of his fingers, woven until you were one fist, clasped tight. If you were a man, you would know the words that would make him love you. You would have known from the beginning what he meant to you, if you only you were a man. You would have fallen for him headfirst instead of sideways, in fits and starts and betrayal and bloodshed and shared moments at a bar. You would know on instinct how to kiss and cuddle and care for. Instead, you’ve learned by clumsy practice how to fuck and fight and bleed and fall. You are edges sharp enough to cut him clean in two. There is no gentleness in you.

You are not his lover, nor brother nor angel nor friend. You are an ally in a warzone. You share the space of a foxhole, the communication of a warrior and the one he protects. If you were a man, you’d be in love with him. As it is, you pick your fallen feathers into the shape of a bouquet. If you could, you would give him roses, but he doesn’t speak the language of flowers. He speaks sin and skin and sacrifice, so that’s what you give to him. Feathers, blades, and gravestones. The food he likes, the beer he drinks, the lines you draw to establish boundaries.

You can’t love him. You’re an angel. There’s some other explanation for the longing, the bitterness that pounds in you with every brush of his eyes. There are vacancies where words should be on the back of your tongue. Truths you both refuse to acknowledge. Silences built like the flimsiest truce.

You do not clasp his shoulder, squeeze the fingers till you leave your mark upon him once again. Even so, you fear you’ve changed him, all the same.

He still prays to you. After all you’ve done, all you’ve become, he prays. Every night in Purgatory, his words ringing in your ears like condemnation, a brittle reminder of your fault and misplaced faith. Even after he found you again, he still prayed. In fractured words and tiny, momentary whispers. In the white light of Heaven’s locked asylum, and the thick gloom of a reservoir lakebed, and through the hazy, cottonsoft blooms of madness, his words soothed you. You kept his compliments in a lockbox and the key under his tongue. You bore his criticisms like bullet holes.

Once, you worried about your depth of feeling for him. Now, you only worry that those feelings are reciprocated.

If this is love— _if_ —then love, your love, must always be accompanied with pain. You will not inflict it on him. You have hurt each other before with your casual cowardice. You will not do so again.

He is the righteous man. The faithless man who prays, each day, to his wayward angel. You could be poetry, but you’ll never be in love.

He shoots the question off in bullets. You keep the answer beneath your coat.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me at jellyfishline.tumblr.com.


End file.
